E.T. Atari cartridges finally found in New Mexico desert

"What was often scoffed at as an urban legend has been revealed as truth: excavators have uncovered the infamous E.T. Atari cartridge landfill in a New Mexico desert.

The dig was organized by Canadian entertainment company Fuel Industries in order to film a documentary about the 1983 burial of purportedly millions of unsold Atari cartridges. The excavation was officially approved by the Alamogordo City Commission and started today.

Xbox's Major Nelson, along with other onlookers have tweeted out pictures of the excavation team holding these cartridges. Some of these are reportedly shrink-wrapped, complete-in-box copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which is often considered one of the biggest commercial failures in the history of gaming." - Patrick Kulikowski
(Atari, E.T, Industry)

Well, actually the 1983 video game industry crash was not caused by a single game, but this game in particular was the symbol of that failure.

In the 70's, video games were being increasingly popular thanks to the success of games like Pong, Space Invaders or Pac-Man. Many manufacturers saw there a way to get easy profits. Thus, they started creating their own consoles and developing their own games, and due to a lack of control, it was pretty easy to copy or clone a successful video game.

Manufacturers started to flood the shelves with cloned and/or low quality games. As a consequence, they were producing tons of shitty games but didn't meet their sale expectations, meaning publishers had a bunch of unsold copies to deal with.

You need to understand how the video game industry works to understand how it failed.

Let's say you're a publisher. You ask a developer to create a game, and you decide to produce X copies of this game. Then you sell your copies to retailers, and retailers sell the game to the consumers. But what happens when you produce games that ultimately don't sell?

Every unsold copy of the game is sent back to the publisher, and you have two options there: either you refund the retailers for the unsold copies, either you send retailers a new game with a discount and you get rid of those unsold copies.

This is that mentality that caused the 1983 video game crash. Due to the amount of video game consoles on the video game market in early 80's, the concurrence of computers and the lack of quality control, released games were getting worse and worse, resulting a decrease in sales.

Retailers send the unsold copies to publishers, and in order to avoir a refund, they were rushing a new game to send to retailers, and so on. Many studios and manufacturers went bankrupt.

ET was just the best example of that era. Atari produced tons of cartridge, thinking the success of the movie would mean the success of the video game, but it mostly didn't (ET actually sold pretty well, 1 million copies IIRC, but Atari still produced way too much cartridges). And as retailers sent their ET cartridges back, Atari had to do something of all those unsold copies. According to the myth, they burried them in a desert in New Mexico.

In 1983, everyone were leaving the boat. The video game industry was no longer viable, and whoever stayed went bankrupt or was nearly dead. Nintendo developed the Famicom / NES keeping in mind what caused the 1983 crash and decided to impose quality control over their third party content.

(please apologize me if there is any grammatical mistake, I'm French but did my best to be understandable. The 1983 crash is a fascinating era and you should know that some practices that caused the crash are still living nowadays...)

tl;dr > The 1983 crash was caused by 3 factors: - lack of morality / quality control; - a huge flood of games and consoles; - the video game ecomic system;

It wasn't really the fault of ET. Itbwas due to the oversaturation of the market with too many devices combined with a lot of low quality games that go thrown together quickly to cash in on the rising market.

That is also one of the reasons why we got the Nintendo seal of approval and in general on consoles more strictly requirements to release games.on the platform.

@Mouktouk: Retailers don't send unsold games back to publishers. Just like with all other products in stores, retailers buy products from producers and those items which they can't sell at full price ends up in bargain bins. Publishers end up with excess stock because they have produced too many games and retailers never even order them from publisher. Even these copies of E.T. were probably never in stores.

The crash was actually due to a number of contributing factors. Arcades were still big and consoles were relentless expensive for much less graphical fidelity. I think people blame it on ET because it was just such a bad game. Then came ol' Nintendo to give everyone the NES and resurrect and bring consoles into dominance. :)

I think you did a good job there. Though it should be noted that the console gaming market (capitol-wsie) was MUCH smaller back then compared to now. Even during the NES/SNES/Genesis eras the market was relatively small. It wasn't until the PS1-era that the Home console market exploded and became HUGE (hundreds of millions of consoles and possibly billions of copies of software sold).

As such the size of the market has become somewhat self-sustaining with checks and balances to prevent over-saturation from too many consoles (arguably one of the biggest contributors to the crash in the '80s). It is very difficult for a 4th console to become successful to live alongside the other three. Hell even the 3rd console usually has to scrape by with whatever fate hands them.

Floods of bad software (read shovelware) were detrimental in the '80s because the market was smaller and there was more to loose. Now, that is just not the case (just look at the amount of shovelware on the Wii). Publishers have gotten so big now that 10-15 shovelware games, no matter how bad they sell, don't make a dent in the publisher's operational costs and are usually floated by even one mediocre game selling remotely well not even considering super successes of AAA titles.

The only way for the market to crash again is for all three major players (Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft) to make ludicrously STUPID decisions all at the same time. The market has reached the point where 1 out of 3 could completely fail and the market would be unphased, and 2 out of 3 could fail and the market would survive long enough for at least 1 minor player (new entry to the market) to rise in the ranks to become a major player.

Here's the good thing about physical copies. When they suck, I can bury them or resell them. When I download them, I lost my money 100% and stuck with a sh*tty game until i delete it, but still lost my money. My concern is that everyone buys digitally and the publishers don't give a damn, they have our money and gives us crappy unfinished games in return.

@Gamespawn Shovelware or not, they aren't as bad as ET... Nintendo had that Seal of Quality, it's the reason why games were great back in the day. It prompted consumer confidence to buy the console.

These days, with HD gaming, the industry does not even try to take risks. We barely got a few new IPs and most of them are Indies. But you know there will be another Call of Duty, Another Assassin's Creed, Another Skylander, Another [Insert your yearly franchise here] that isn't anything different from the previous one.

Knack was an excellent game, stop jumping on the band wagons poser. Classic platformer with a strong crash bandicoot vibe. As well as two player with decent visuals. Stop hating something you never played.

@Monolith Knack was awful. It was generic and lacked any innovation. I platinumed that game after I forced myself psychologically to do so because I didn't want the money to go to waste (I don't sell my games)

If you like it, that's your preference, but Knack was an average game at best.

It's just awful!I played it as a kid and thought I was just to young and dumb to get it.Just to find out years later that it was rely an unplayable mess of a game.And this was only one of many of those said games.It's games like this that SCARRED ME FOR LIFE!

Exact same here! There were 3 game instances that changed the way I pursue games. E.T. was the first followed by Top Gun for the Nintendo and San Francisco Rush for the PS1. Since those fails, I refuse to buy a game before a review from from a trusted source or before I rent/borrow it.

Haha you're not alone there, I was 8 or 9, I guess that gave everybody a nightmare, falling into the hole was game over for me and it happened just after 2 screens...ET wouldn't stretch its neck enough LOL

Yikes, I think these will actually be pretty expensive considering how historical they are. Unless you specifically want one of these landfill carts I would try to find an independent game shop that sells old games. You might get a reasonably priced copy of ET there.

Edit: the story is interesting. Why is MS interested in doing a documentary like this? I'm a bit confused. Is it to show what they wanted to do to gaming isn't "as bad" as what some have already done? Forgive me, I had to. I have to LOL at a comment in there telling MS to bury millions of consoles while they're there to count them as sold

Am I right in thinking that some company made an atari 2600 that fits in a replica of the controller. The actual controller is a little bigger and had a load of games on the rom inside. Or did I dream this.